Pregnant woman (SLO County)

The popular media image of a woman who has had an abortion is that she regrets it. She sighs with longing whenever she sees a child around the age of her unborn one, thinking that it could have been them.

While the emotional aspect might pop up now and again, many women who’ve had abortions feel that they’ve made the right choice for themselves. A recent study followed women who’ve undergone the procedure and followed up with them for years to determine their emotional wellbeing.

From 2008 to 2010, researchers looked at 667 women across 30 U.S. clinics, and divided them into two groups: women who terminated a pregnancy within the first trimester, and women who terminated within two weeks of the mandated limit. The researchers then called the women every six months afterwards for three years to identify negative and positive emotions associated with the act.

Overall, women felt that they had made the right decision 99% of the time, and experienced “decreased emotional intensity” over time. Those who felt negative emotions were likely to have had a planned pregnancy, and/or difficulty in making the decision to undergo an abortion. There was virtually no difference between how the two groups of women processed the experience.

This is very important information, as it overturns a popularly-held misconception. Hopefully, these results will act as a catalyst so that the Supreme Court will stop basing abortion rulings on “abortion regret.”